Chris Selley’s Full Pundit: Fight night in Ottawa

In which Stephen Harper destroys the EarthGosh, it’s great to see hyperbole and the Toronto Star‘s Christopher Hume getting along so well after all these years. “Though eminently forgettable,” he writes, “the recent federal budget reminds us why the environment is doomed.” Streamlining the environmental review process and trying to limit charitable organizations’ advocacy operations “are not simply a means to an end,” he continues, “but perhaps to the end” — of the environment, of Canada, of days. And Canadians, colonial-minded simpletons that we are, will cheer on these pillagers of Mother Earth as they “rush to pump oil down to the gaping maw of the U.S., the most gluttonous nation on Earth.” (We thought Canadians consumed more energy per capita, but we’re clearly mistaken.) Hume finally concludes with a scare quote from Bill McKibben — whose own hyperbole, the Ottawa Citizen‘s Dan Gardner recently suggested, played a significant role in people tuning out climate change issue entirely.

All that said, as TheGlobe and Mail‘s editorialists argue, it’s tough to justify the government actually spending millions of dollars to clamp down on charities’ political activities and obsessing over “foreign” donations they might receive. “It’s not illegal for Canadian charities to take money from outside the country. And why should it be?” they ask. We wouldn’t complain about foreign money going to fund cancer research or inner-city youth programs. “Why, then, is it wrong for an environmental group?” Agreed. Mind you, it has to go both ways: We’ve rarely detected much openness among left-leaning Canadians to American organizations funding right-wing causes.

The Conservatives’ first majority being just as “tepid” as its minority budgets, Postmedia’s Michael Den Tandt asks The Big Question: “At what point do red-meat conservatives, and Conservatives, begin to wonder if their chosen political vehicle has become all that it once despised?” Tom Flanagan doesn’t seem too worried, Den Tandt reports. But it’s hard not to notice that the modern Conservatives now embody a number of things that led to the Reform Party’s creation in the first place.

Scott Taylor, writing in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, notes that the government’s final report on Canada’s mission in Afghanistan “was quietly dumped in the alley as the budget bandwagon made its way down Main Street” on Thursday, and that recent events — Afghan soldiers attacking NATO soldiers, “the recent discovery of nearly a dozen suicide vests inside the headquarters of the Afghan Ministry of Defence,” a Human Rights Watch report finding that “hundreds of Afghan women are in prison for having fled their homes without their husband’s approval” — pour yet more cold water on the rosy picture contained therein.

The latter situation is “a clear violation of women’s rights” that “flies in the face of Afghanistan’s own constitution, as well as a 2009 presidential decree to eliminate all forms of violence against women,” the Globe‘s editorialistsfume. “It is not too late to lobby for justice — and help protect the most vulnerable.” We suppose not. We can lobby for whatever we want. But if we couldn’t solve these problems over the past decade, how does the Globe expect us to do so with our authority in the region at its low point, soon to drain to zero?

Honour among MPsOn his Maclean’s blog, John Geddes reports from Saturday night’s hideous boxing match between MP Justin Trudeau and Senator Patrick Brazeau, and notes that — based on a pre-fight interview with Geddes — Trudeau had Brazeau “figured from every angle.” He thought that if he withstood the initial attack, he’d be in with a chance, and that’s just how he won. We imagine Trudeau will want a framed copy of Michael Den Tandt‘s column, in the Postmedia papers, predicting he “almost can’t win” the fight.

Andrew Potter, writing in the Citizen, valiantly attempts to redeem Saturday night’s spectacle as a rare display of “honour” in polite society that’s largely post-violence. “By the time the night was through, the MP and the Senator had demonstrated more courage, sportsmanship, mutual respect, and yes, honour, than most of their colleagues will in their entire careers in parliament,” he writes. “These are not just the virtues of the ring, they are the generic virtues of leadership.” Like we said: A valiant attempt. We have no problem with boxing in general, but the whole thing made us want to barf.

Talking of Trudeaus, Conrad Black, writing in the National Post, defends of Trudeau père‘s management of the national unity question. Bilingualism comes with irritations, he concedes, such as “the deluge of money that was collected in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia, and delivered upon Quebec almost as indiscriminately as if it had been (and still is), thrown out of low-flying aircraft like ammunition to the Warsaw uprising of 1944.” But you cannot deny, says Black, that it “defanged the separatists,” and “spare[d] Canada the agony of the attempted secession of a province holding a quarter of its population.”

Over at Huffington Post, New Democrat MP Charlie Angus explains why he abandoned Twitter. Some of his reasons are good, such as that there are too many horrible, stupid people. And some of his reasons are bad, such as his annoyance that media would quote things that he said, in jest, on Twitter. If you don’t want to be quoted, sir, perhaps you shouldn’t say things in public. This rule predates even the Internet.

The Calgary Herald‘s editorialists are well pleased to see MP Rob “The Immovable Object” Anders finally suffer some sort of rebuke — namely removal from the Veterans Affairs Committee and appointment as Head Bee Guy — for his heroic feats of jackassery.

The American journeySun Media’s Michael Coren — whose initial response to last summer’s massacre in Norway read as follows: “OKAY, FOR THE LAST TIME: IT’S A RELIGION OF PEACE!!!! DO I HAVE TO SAY IT IN BLOODY NORWEGIAN?”; and whose subsequent blog post admitted that while the attacks “may, just may, have been the result of non-Islamic madness,” those accusing him of jumping to conclusions were “missing the point” — now condemns those who jump to conclusions as to George Zimmerman’s motives for killing Trayvon Martin. “Epic fail,” as the kids say nowadays. (The kids still say that, right?)

Rex Murphy, by contrast, is qualified to express frustration at the racial politics and the jumping to conclusions in this case without spontaneously bursting into a great fireball of hypocrisy. “If indeed Zimmerman turns out to be some murderous bigot, then that consideration in itself is all the bad news the world needs,” he observes in the Post. “Does he also need to be a kind of living proof … that American race relations are as poisoned as they ever were?” Could we not at least wait to come to that conclusion?

Amidst all this hideousness, the Globe‘s Doug Saundersexplains that Americans have in fact “become more politically progressive” — he cites a “steady” and “accelerating” shift “toward racial and sexual tolerance, acceptance of equal roles for women, religious minorities and immigrants, and support for social liberalism” — as the inevitable result of better education, more racial and ethnic diversity and a proliferation of non-traditional family arrangements. People outside America tend not to notice this, Saunders observes, in part because foreign media love to focus on the “dark side,” and in part because the political system affords “the loud and intolerant, … spread across the thin, underpopulated land in the middle, … disproportionate ballot clout.”